https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/09/movie-review-all-in-stacey-abrams/
A new documentary focusing on Abrams mixes real history with modern myths.
Voter suppression has become a national talking point,” a narrator says in the new Amazon documentary All In: The Fight for Democracy.
Indeed, it has. As November 3 fast approaches, conversations are boiling on the issues of voter suppression, mail-in voting (and its pitfalls), poll access in a pandemic, and voter fraud. But the national talking point of voter suppression is, at the end of the day, just a hip talking point. And it also is a myth. It has also become a very convenient, useful, and savvy excuse for Stacey Abrams’s loss in the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election. All In: The Fight for Democracy, though sharply filmed, well crafted, and quite creative in its use of animation, ultimately peddles myth and delusions of grandeur.The documentary mixes history, political science, and memoir. It is entertaining at times, but also alarming. It revisits the United States’ bloody, racist past via photographs, newsreel footage, and clips of D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. It is horrific, and to be clear, this section isn’t myth. The alarming, mythical aspects are the documentary’s flirting with the “1619” interpretation of the Constitution; its full-bodied embrace of identity politics; and its creators’ genuine belief that certain states’ voting laws in 2020 are Jim Crow 2.0.
Directors Liz Garbus and Lisa Cortés imply that the origins of the supposed voter-suppression crisis of 2020 lie not in racist practice alone. Rather, it begins with the very wording of the Constitution and its malicious drafters, who sought to forever exclude blacks, minorities, and women from fully participating in democratic elections. For Garbus, Cortés, and Abrams, the constitutional well is poisoned. This is a misleading view. Of course there were times throughout American history when whites — most notably, members of the Ku Klux Klan — actively barred minorities from voting in local elections. They instilled fear into black communities through lynching, and set up cruel, tautological literacy tests to vet potential voters. Women wouldn’t vote until the ratification of the 19th amendment in 1920. But the American founding and the Founding document are nearly perfect, if imperfectly applied across the centuries. No other country in the history of the world began with such a revolutionary piece of paper, based on such revolutionary ideas. In 2020, more freedom and prosperity have been attained by all races, creeds, sexes, genders, etc. Fill in your identity group of choice, and they will be protected by the Constitution.